Outrage in Calcutta

Copyrighted Material CHAPTER ONE Outrage in Calcutta The mythical history of the British Empire in the East begins in a black hole. In the evolutionary history of stars, the black hole is a theoretical con struct. Scientists tell us that most of the black hole’s properties cannot be di rectly observed. When the core matter of a star cools, contracts, and collapses into a black hole, the space-time around it is so sharply curved that no light escapes, no matter is ejected, and all details of the imploding star are obliter ated. An outside observer cannot associate any meaningful sense of time with the interior events, and hence, in the absence of any chronological equivalence, no communication could possibly take place with an inside observer, if there were one. Scientists do, of course, infer the existence of black holes from ob serving disks of dust or hot gas near the cores of stars, but no actual black hole has ever been observed so far. Th e Black Hole of Calcutta has a somewhat similar status in the history of modern empires. Where exactly was it located, and what happened inside it? How do we know anything about the place or event? To answer these questions, we will need to excavate many layers of narrative and doctrine that lie buried under our currently fashionable postimperial edifi ce of the global community of nations. The Travels of a Monument Dalhousie Square is the heart of the administrative district of Calcutta, a city whose name is now offi cially spelled, in accordance with the Bengali colloquial form, Kolkata. Like many other colonial landmarks in the city, Dalhousie Square too was renamed in the 1960s. Th e new name is mostly used as an ac ronym on buses and traffi c signs: Bi-ba-di Bag. In Bengali, it sounds as though the place has been named after parties in a legal dispute. But in its expanded form, the name is Binay-Badal-Dinesh Bag, which memorializes three daring young men who, on a winter’s day in 1930, walked into the Writers’ Buildings and shot dead Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Skinner Simpson, the inspector general of prisons, while he was sitting at his desk in his offi ce. Th e massive red-brick structure of the Writers’ Buildings in fact occupies and dominates the entire northern side of the square, throwing a vast crimson refl ection on the Copyrighted Material 2 • Chapter One shimmering surface of the pool at the center. Th e principal ministries of the provincial government are still housed in the Writers’ Buildings, as they were in the days when the British ruled India. On the western side of the square stands one of the more distinctive buildings of colonial Calcutta—the General Post Offi ce (GPO)—built in the classical style with Corinthian columns and a Re naissance dome. On a workday, the bustle around the place is overwhelming, with hundreds of people scampering up or down the white marble semicircular fl ight of stairs leading up to an elegant domed hall, encircled by dozens of counters. On the pavement, along the tall iron railings of the post offi ce, stand innumerable vendors peddling the most disparate array of goods one can imag ine, from food to envelopes and pens to lottery tickets. Hundreds of buses and minibuses swerve around the GPO in or out of Bi-ba-di Bag every few min utes, honking frenetically and belching noxious fumes. No one here has the least suspicion that the city has not always been this way. How can one imagine a Calcutta without Dalhousie Square and the GPO? An attentive visitor, however, may notice a small plaque high up on the GPO’s eastern wall. It says, somewhat obscurely: “The brass lines in the adja cent steps and pavement mark the position and extent of part of the south-east bastion of Old Fort William the extreme south-east point being 95 feet from this wall.” Th e brass lines are diffi cult to fi nd, but along one of the lower steps there is a strip of what looks like wrought iron running southward for a few yards and then coming to an abrupt stop.Th ere is no further clue here as to the mystery of the fort wall. Just north of the GPO there is another red-brick public building known as the Calcutta Collectorate, and further north, running all the way to the corner of Fairlie Place, there is a grand nineteenth-century structure—the headquar ters of the Eastern Railway. Rather incongruously, a modern building from the 1960s stands in between, housing the Calcutta offi ces of the Reserve Bank of India. Th e entire northern and western sections of Dalhousie Square have an unmistakable Victorian look—an aesthetic richness that is rudely spoiled, for the purist, by the monumental banality of the Reserve Bank. Th ere was once a less grand nineteenth-century building at that spot, but it was pulled down in the 1960s. It used to be the Custom House. Th e street running west out of the square past the GPO leads to the Hugli River. Th is is Koila Ghat, literally the Coal Wharf. It is said that the name is a corruption of Killa Ghat, which would associate the place with a fort. Leading south from Dalhousie Square is Council House Street, which runs past the yard of St. John’s Church, built in 1787 and serving until 1847 as the city’s Anglican cathedral. Before its recent renovation, it was in a poor state of repair for a long time. Th e churchyard has some of the oldest funerary architecture from British Calcutta, including the mausoleum of Job Charnock, who founded the fi rst English settlement at Sutanuti, and the grave of Vice Admiral Charles Watson, Copyrighted Material Outrage in Calcutta • 3 Figure 1. The Holwell Monument at St. John’s Church. Photo: Abhijit Bhattacharya who along with Robert Clive (1725–74) led the British reconquest of Fort William in 1757. Both of these structures are remarkable for their distinctly Islamic styles—a sign that local masons at the time had still not been trained to build according to European designs. More interesting for the present pur pose, though, is a monument standing near the churchyard’s western wall, sur rounded by overgrown shrubs and piles of rubbish. It is a white marble obelisk on an octagonal base, with inscribed tablets on six of its sides and a fl oral frieze on the other two. Th e main inscription reads as follows: Th is Monument Has been erected by Lord Curzon, Viceroy and Governor-General of India, In the year 1902, Upon the site And in reproduction of the design Of the original monument To the memory of the 123 persons Who perished in the Black Hole prison Of Old Fort William On the night of the 20th of June, 1756. Copyrighted Material 4 • Chapter One Th e former memorial was raised by Th eir surviving fellow-suff erer J. Z. Holwell, Governor of Fort William, On the spot where the bodies of the dead Had been thrown into the ditch of the ravelin. It was removed in 1821. Th e next tablet displays the names of twenty-seven persons whom John Zeph ania Holwell (1711–98) originally listed as having died in the Black Hole.Two other tablets list fifty-four additional victims whose names have been “recov ered from oblivion by reference to contemporary documents.” Th e memorial is actually in the wrong place, because this is neither the site of the Black Hole prison nor where the victims’ bodies were allegedly thrown. At the base of the monument, there is another inscription: Th is Monument was erected in 1902 by Lord Curzon on the original site of the Black Hole (North-West corner of Dalhousie Square) and removed thence to the Cemetery of St. John’s Church, Calcutta in 1940. We are dealing, then, with two monuments.Th e original one, by all accounts, stood somewhere on the northwest corner of what was then called the Tank Square, long before James Andrew Ramsay, Lord Dalhousie (1812–60), was memorialized there as an imperial hero. We know from the records that the ruins of the old fort, including the site of the Black Hole prison, were demol ished in 1818 when the old Custom House was built. The Holwell monument stood outside the walls of the old fort—that is, somewhere in front of the pres ent Collectorate building. We also know that the original monument was designed and built, probably in 1760, by Holwell, a survivor of the Black Hole incident, to whom we owe the only detailed narrative of the event. Th e inscription on the front of the monu ment then had forty-eight names of those who with sundry other Inhabitants, Military and Militia to the Number of 123 Persons, were by the Tyrannic Violence of Surajud Dowla, Suba of Bengal, Suff ocated in the Black Hole Pri son of Fort William in the Night of the 20th Day of June, 1756, and promiscuously thrown the succeed ing Morning into the Ditch of the Copyrighted Material Outrage in Calcutta • 5 Figure 2. Holwell’s plan for his monument and inscription. Source: Holwell 1774, frontispiece Ravelin of this Place, Th is Monument is Erected by Their Surviving Fellow Suff erer, J. Z. HOLWELL. On the reverse of the monument, the inscription said: This Horrid Act of Violence was as Amply as deservedly revenged on Surajud Dowla, by his Majesty’s Arms, under the Conduct of Vice Admiral Watson and Coll.

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